


I Can See the Sky Falling

by IncognitoDuck11



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Drug Addiction, Established Relationship, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues, Not Canon Compliant, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25101382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncognitoDuck11/pseuds/IncognitoDuck11
Summary: A series of unrelated one-shots revolving around Sparia and mental illness.
Relationships: Spencer Hastings & Aria Montgomery, Spencer Hastings/Aria Montgomery
Kudos: 14





	1. Author's Note

A/N: I've been struggling a lot with my mental health, so as a way to help me cope and kind of vent, I started writing Sparia fics that used them as a vehicle for what I was feeling. Instead of posting a bunch of individual one-shots, I decided to do a series focused around different mental illnesses. They still need a lot of polishing, so updates will probably be slow. And just FYI, most (but not all) of these are set in a world where Spencer and Aria are in an established romantic relationship and -A never happened (except I will be addressing the Dollhouse once or twice). And I suppose I should include trigger warnings, although I tried to be as sensitive as possible, especially when writing the illnesses I don't have personal experience with. It was difficult to balance sensitivity with realism and trying not to romanticize anything, so please bear with me and feel free to point out anything that's blatantly wrong. I'm not an expert, although I assure you that I did oodles of research, especially for things like schizophrenia, DID, addiction, and PTSD. I think it's important to have representation and I'm trying my best to add to it because I haven't seen a lot of PLL fics that get mental illness right. There are certainly quite a few, but a lot of them run with the show's narrative that mental illness makes a person inherently dangerous, which is all fun and games in fiction, but if you apply that idea to real life people, it's wrong and downright dangerous. It doesn't, so if you seriously believe that misconception, please abandon it and seek to educate yourself further on the topic. PSA over :)

This is cross posted from FF.net, and also my first post on AO3!

 **Potential Triggers for OCD (Pure O, Harm OCD), Depression (Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, Self-harm), Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, PTSD, Schizophrenia, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Drug Addiction**. **(Feel free to remind me if I miss anything!) T** **read carefully if any of these topics could set you back, and please remember to take care of yourself first and foremost.**

_Title from "Hold My Hand" by The Fray._


	2. Can Somebody Help Me Out?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon compliant through season 6A. Sparia friendship. Rated T.
> 
> Trigger Warnings: References to past suicide attempt (nothing graphic described).

* * *

_Can somebody help me out?_

_I can't find my feet_

_I'm sinking in the deep_

_Can somebody pick me up?_

_The voice is too loud_

_I'm losing in the crowd_

_Because I, can't breathe_

_Oh, I can't breathe_

"Lung" by Vancouver Sleep Clinic

* * *

_**December 21, 2014** _

_**Oak Grove Psychiatric Hospital, Maryland** _

_**1:08 P.M.** _

Aria pulled her rental car into a vacant spot in a modest parking lot and put it in park. She fumbled the key out of the ignition, her hands clammy even as the heater shut off and cold air began to seep into the sedan's cabin. The radio's mindless chatter went silent alongside it, and the absence of distraction made her stomach twist.

"Okay, _breathe_ , Aria," she muttered, mentally scolding herself. It was so selfish to be focusing on her own nervousness at a time like this, when her best friend needed her. There wasn't any time for it.

Refortified, she pushed the door open and swung a leg out, her heel clomping onto the pavement as a freezing gust of wind smacked her square in the face. It shook her composure a little, but Mother Nature refused to offer her any mercy, tugging violently at her hair and targeting the few places where her skin was exposed. Her nose started running and she shivered, huddled in on herself. She only realized she was crying when her face began to hurt, tears freezing against her skin.

She ran the backs of her hands across her cheeks, soaked up the sign of her weakness with the mittens she'd only just knitted a few days ago, and started toward the massive, sprawling brick building before her, its shadow devouring her annoyance with herself. Her head tilted back as she climbed a few stairs leading to the main entrance, and she stared hard at one of the windows carved into the elegant building's face. There were no bars on it, nothing so reminiscent of Radley Sanitarium, and a spike of relief hit her, for Spencer's sake more than anything.

The interior was just as stately as the exterior, but infinitely cozier—the lobby peaceful and, more importantly, _warm_. It had the clean, inviting look of a hospital or a spa resort, not the crumbling, haunted feeling that she associated with this kind of place.

( _Loony bin. Nuthouse. Psych ward._ )

There was a twenty-something receptionist behind the counter, boredly smacking her gum as she entered something into her computer. She saw a nurse in lilac scrubs bustle across the room, clipboard in hand. And a man with a plastic hospital bracelet was sweeping the floor, humming absently to the generic pop song playing from a nearby radio. The walls were painted a soothing blue and adorned with posters advertising crisis text lines and rehab centers, and reminding everyone that health insurance fraud _is_ a crime. It was quiet, but not eerie, not suffocating. Just calm.

Aria blew out a breath she didn't know she was holding. It looked so… _normal_. Not like the miserable hellhole that sat in her hometown, that place that was responsible for so much of the insanity she endured as a teenager. Briefly, she wondered if Charlotte was in a place like this—getting _real_ care—but she halted that train of thought before it's wheels began to turn, claustrophobic flickers of wooden boxes and shotguns and switchboards threatening to encroach upon her.

Her heart still had a tendency to jump into her throat when her phone chimed, dark, tight places still gave her panic attacks, and it was a wonder they weren't all in facilities like this. Though Aria's therapist insisted she was making progress, coping well with the ample amount of trauma her psyche had endured–

And there she was thinking about herself again.

She swiveled her head toward a waiting area tucked on one side of the room, where a brightly-colored miniature table meant for kids caught her eye first, followed by the neat cluster of adult-sized chairs around it. A familiar figure sat slumped in one of them, eyes trained vacantly on the floor as she gnawed at her thumbnail. It was a habit Aria had hated, but she found her lips curving upward at the sight because it meant that Spencer was here, and, by extension, alive and breathing.

Unwilling to break the reverent quiet of the room or startle her friend—who looked awfully skittish—by calling her name, Aria strode toward her. The sound of her shoes clacking against the tile was enough to catch Spencer's attention, and Aria noticed immediately that her friend looked sickly and malnourished in a way that suggested she was on the upswing—mid-recovery maybe. Her sunken eyes didn't smile even as her lips did when Aria pulled her into a hug, but she felt the tension leak from Spencer's body as the taller woman slumped against her.

"Hey," came Spencer's voice, muffled in her shoulder. Her arms felt familiarly bony, fragile as they wrapped around Aria's back, but her embrace was still as warm and steady as ever. Her heart was pounding along at it's normal pace: quick and anxious. Strong. "God I'm glad to see you."

"Likewise, stranger," teased Aria, settling her hands gently below Spencer's shoulder blades, the ladder of her rib cage unrelenting beneath her fingertips. She decided not to ask any stupid questions, a _how are you?_ dying on her tongue. "I missed you so much."

She winced. _So much for trying not to say the wrong thing_. She'd missed Spencer _so much_ , in fact, that she never bothered to call her. Never checked up on her. Hadn't known anything was wrong until her phone rang three nights ago and a random nurse filled her in. The woman's tone was sharp and suspicious when she spoke: _Yes, is this Aria Montgomery? I'm calling about Spencer Hastings._ _Spencer listed you as an emergency contact. We can't reach immediate family_. She'd rattled off terms like _suicide watch_ and _involuntary commitment._ Spencer had been kept under observation for 72 hours, then transferred to an inpatient psychiatric facility, where she stayed for two weeks.

Her best friend had tried to kill herself.

"I'm sorry," she blurted, pulling back and bracing Spencer's shoulders. Her brows pulled together as she stared up into her friend's tired eyes, noting the faint purple shadows hanging beneath them and the disarming nonchalance that had settled into her expression. "God… Spencer, I am _so_ sorry."

Spencer just stared back at her, seemingly unbothered. "For what? You didn't do anything."

" _Exactly_ ," input Aria, pulling Spencer in for another tight hug. "I wasn't there when you needed me. I'm such an idiot, Spence."

 _Wow, way to make it about yourself, Aria_. She mentally kicked herself. _The last thing Spencer needs right now is to worry about consoling you._

"Well, you're here now," Spencer reminded her, giving her a reassuring pat on the back before pulling away. "So let's ditch this joint."

Spencer charged past her with a surprising hint of her old restlessness, muttering something about her terms of discharge that Aria struggled to catch. The petite brunette kicked it into overdrive to catch up with her taller friend, who was already halfway to the door.

"Hold on, Spence," she said when they reached the door. "I don't have to sign anything or–?"

"I'm an adult," Spencer told her, as if that wasn't obvious. "And it was their decision to release me, anyway. I could've walked home if there wasn't a blizzard on the way."

Aria nodded, feeling a bit ruffled by the other woman's irritability. "Okay, that's all I needed to know. You don't need to–" she caught herself before she snapped and pressed her lips together, looking up into those weary, coffee-colored irises to _remind_ herself of the situation. Spencer's frazzling energy was all shot nerves, she realized. She must've been tired to her bones, ready to collapse into her own bed.

Spencer's eyes bore into her, reminding her of a startled doe in the unforgiving flash of headlights. But maybe it was just an afterimage; the car had already struck, driven away, and now Aria's job was to peel a mangled body off the asphalt.

"Yeah. Yeah, okay, we'll get you out of here, Spence," she consoled, slipping an arm around to rest a firm hand against the middle of her friend's back. It felt risky, like trying to smooth the hackles of a snarling wolf down, but Spencer visibly relaxed at her touch. Her willowy frame shuddered with a heavy breath, and Aria steered her gently toward the entrance.

Resting her free hand on the door's handle before she wrenched it open, Aria glanced back over her shoulder, suddenly aware that Spencer didn't have anything with her. She scanned the waiting area for a forgotten suitcase, a backpack, anything she could help carry, but there was nothing. Spencer wasn't even wearing a coat; her hands stuffed in a thin, gray jacket instead. "You don't have any…?"

"I was admitted involuntarily," Spencer explained with a slight grimace. "Not much time to pack."

Deciding not to push the issue, Aria shrugged and slipped out of her own fleece-lined pea coat without a second thought. She draped it across Spencer's shoulders before her bull-headed friend's sense of chivalry could kick in, and all but shoved Spencer out the door.

Without the coat, Aria was practically bowled over by the freezing bite of wind that greeted them, but she was wearing three layers to combat it. Spencer looked downright frostbitten in comparison, and any protests about Aria giving up her coat seemingly died behind her chattering teeth. She pulled it tighter around herself like a cloak instead of attempting to shove her arms through the sleeves, the garment a size too small but helping to block the wind somewhat. Her head ducked below the collar as they descended the stairs, and Aria was thankful that her thick waves of hair were covering her ears.

Spencer sniffled as they hurried across the lot to the car, and glanced up one last time at the ominous gray sky before tumbling into the passenger seat. She rubbed her hands together for warmth while Aria started the engine and cranked up the heater, and then Aria took a moment to catch her breath. The notes of a song flitted gently from the radio to fill the silence, soothing like a lullaby.

When Aria looked over, Spencer's eyes were closed.

"You should try to nap, we've got a bit of a drive ahead of us," she said quietly, and the corner of Spencer's mouth quirked upwards.

"Sure. If my brain will allow it." Her eyelids peeled back, and she angled her head to give Aria a surprisingly soft look. "Thank you. For showing up."

"Of course. You needed someone." Aria's brow pulled together sincerely. "So I'm here. That's the deal, Hastings. I'll fly halfway around the world if you need me, even if you're deep undercover in the Russian mob or something."

Spencer's gravelly chuckle was warm and genuine. "I'm studying for a career in politics, not the CIA." Her expression tightened almost imperceptibly, and she broke eye contact, shame flickering across her face. "Or I was, at least."

Aria's heart lurched as she watched Spencer scrub at her face with her hands, like she was trying to remove the evidence of her self-proclaimed failure. Aria could practically guess what her next words were going to be.

"I am such a ridiculously huge fuck up."

"Hey," Aria prompted, cautiously curling her hands around Spencer's wrists, pulling them down so she could lace their fingers together. Reassure her instead of letting her hide. "Don't say that."

Spencer's face crumpled, but her voice came out bitter and jagged as broken glass. "Why not? It's true."

"Even if you believe that, Spencer, you shouldn't talk to yourself like that."

"Should, shouldn't. What does it matter? I shouldn't have fumbled the ball like I did, but here we are!" Her best friend screwed her eyes shut, but that didn't stop a few tears from slipping out.

Aria squeezed her hands tightly. "Hey, look at me."

Spencer's lips tightened into a firm line and she took a few unsteady breaths through her nose. Then she opened her eyes and glanced almost sheepishly at Aria.

"You wouldn't talk to me like that, would you?"

"Definitely not," eked the woman. "But you're not–"

"No buts," Aria commanded, as gently as she could. "If you wouldn't say it to me, then you're not allowed to say it to yourself. Got it? Just keep telling the mean parts of that big brain of yours to shut up." She slipped her hands out of Spencer's and grabbed her face on impulse, pulling her down to plant a firm kiss on her forehead. "Try to rest for now. Doctor's orders."

Despite herself, Spencer gave her a shaky nod. Aria released her and put the car in drive, but she kept her foot on the brake until Spencer had reclined her seat and curled into a semi-comfortable position. Aria's coat laid across her like a blanket, thankfully acting as some kind of comfort, but Spencer's brow remained creased and worried when she closed her eyes.

"It's gonna be alright, Spence," Aria told her as they pulled out of the parking lot. "Now let's get you home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this first installment! I absolutely love the song this little blurb was inspired by, so check it out if you'd like, and take care of yourself in these difficult times :)


	3. Friends with Shadows on my Wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not canon compliant/AU. Sparia in an established romantic relationship. Rated T.
> 
> Trigger Warnings: Schizophrenia. Mention of frightening auditory/visual hallucinations. Mention of improper/negligent physical restraint by medical staff. Mention of Adderall abuse.

* * *

_All day_

_Staring at the ceiling_

_Making friends with shadows on my wall_

_All night_

_Hearing voices telling me_

_That I should get some sleep_

_Because tomorrow might be good for something._

"Unwell" by Matchbox Twenty

* * *

Honestly, to Spencer their relationship sounded like the premise of an offensive comedy skit.

Two schizophrenics fall in love. What could _possibly_ go wrong?

Not a lot, it turned out. There was a lot that was going _right_ , actually. In fact, Spencer had never felt such a close connection to someone. She usually knew exactly where Aria was coming from and vice versa. Which wasn't to say that there weren't bad days, and longer periods where symptoms flared up for one of them, but their relationship was pretty rock-solid through it all.

So far, they had yet to go full-on folie à deux with each other, but they often joked about the possibility. Because it could happen, they supposed, and that was a scary thought. Scary enough that they had to joke about it or else it put a strain on their existence. But, logically, they knew that the timing would have to be pretty perfect for that to happen. It was worst case scenario.

Their symptoms were under control for the most part. Sure, Spencer's inflection was typically that of a robot and Aria heard voices on the daily, but there wasn't much to be done about flat affect, and Aria's psychiatrist wasn't concerned because the voices were less intrusive when they were under control and they greatly inspired Aria's art, anyway. For there to be a real problem, they'd have to quit their meds at the same time, and experience a psychotic break at the same time, which was when it's much harder for them to differentiate between what's real and what isn't. Usually, they could tell when a voice was internal with basic common sense—if they're alone, then it's probably just a hallucination, for example. They could reaffirm that a delusion was just a delusion by asking someone. And if one of them decided to quit taking their medication, because they were of the impression that it was poison or they forgot or simply didn't like the side-effects, the other was quick to intervene, if necessary. They helped each other keep up with the pills, and would absolutely stage an intervention if something ever turned up amiss.

But those instances were few and far between. With their current treatment plans, they were able to function like healthy adults. They both finished college. Spencer worked on Capitol Hill as a lobbyist and Aria was an editor for a publishing company. They had a decent apartment, and could afford the cost of living and a little extra. They were lucky, but that didn't mean that the side effects didn't get to them, or that they hadn't had to make adjustments along the way.

It had been rough for them both. They met in a group therapy session when they were both struggling twenty-two-year-olds. Aria had only recently been diagnosed when they met, but Spencer's schizophrenia was early-onset, came on when she was just seventeen, and she'd already had three psychotic breaks and subsequent hospitalizations by the time she found herself in group therapy, picking at a paper coffee cup and watching the pretty girl in the chair across from her.

Aria had been her first everything. Well, everything except her first kiss, which she didn't count anyway. In high school, she'd only kissed one boy, and they'd been drunk at a house party, and he'd tried to grope her chest and she'd smacked him across the face. It'd been her finest teenage hour, really, because everything else was a mess. Already, she wasn't exactly Miss Popular, her only friends being the people in academic decathlon and debate club, and she wasn't very close with any of them anyway. Through middle school up into high school, she kept herself to herself, and focused on keeping her grades up, making captain of the field hockey team, participating in extracurriculars that would look good on a college application. It's what her parents wanted, and they were plenty happy with how she was busting her ass instead of enjoying her youth.

Well, they were happy up until she went from perpetually stressed-out to patient in a mental hospital.

They only noticed that something was up when it started to effect her grades. It started with the sound of television static roaring low in her ears, keeping her up late at night, but she didn't even have a TV in her bedroom. At first she thought it _was_ just a side-effect of stress, which, in retrospect, maybe it was, but it didn't go away. It got worse. She drank coffee to stay awake in class, struggled to cover the dark circles under her eyes with concealer, and scribbled her way through assignments.

That was the hardest part, really. Her entire sense of self worth had hinged on her academic achievement. So as it started to slip through her fingers like water, she began to hate herself. She couldn't concentrate like she used to, the letters on the pages of her homework trembling like they might fall off. She stopped caring enough to take her usual meticulous, color-coded notes, pretending to write while actually drawing loop after loop after loop on each line. Then some mix of self-loathing and desperation had her make the worst mistake that she could have:

Adderall.

It was easy to get with a three-digit allowance. Convinced that all she needed was an extra boost, she took dose after unprescribed dose of it with her coffee, clawed her way back to the top of the class with each tiny white pill that scraped down her throat, and suddenly she didn't need to sleep at all. It was amazing, until one night the static in her head turned into a voice. A man, muttering in her ear:

_So tired._ _Go to sleep._ _You look sleepy_.

She couldn't sleep, just laid in bed and listened to him talk like it was some science experiment and not the verge of a mental health crisis. She'd been fascinated, initially, of the narration in her ears, up until other, scarier voices started to speak, but those came later.

She went to school the next day like nothing had happened. Dragged herself out of bed and threw on the first thing she pulled from her closet. She hadn't brushed her hair or her teeth. Couldn't recall the last time she'd showered. But it didn't matter because she had a new friend. _Toby_ , she'd called him. He had a nice voice. She was lonely, and he was there, commenting on everything as she went through her day. And he was there for weeks before her parents took notice of the state she was in.

They took her to a doctor. She didn't tell him about Toby. He prescribed her antidepressants, which gave her splitting headaches and made her nauseous. Toby didn't trust them, told her to stop taking them, so she did. She took her Adderall instead, until one day a few more voices joined in. They stuck around. She didn't like them nearly as much as Toby. They were frightening, loud, cruel. And then the visual hallucinations started. Spiders the size of her hand would crawl up her walls. Strangers would walk into her bedroom and start going through her things. Suspicious people followed her at school. And at some point she wound up driving a hundred miles an hour down the highway, convinced that she had to get the fuck out of her sleepy little hometown before _they_ showed up to take her away.

She was a useless druggie. A failure. A bad person. She deserved to be taken away, locked up. The voices told her these lies all the time. There was so much _noise_.

Somehow, she ended up in a hospital bed. Tied down like an animal—her worst nightmare. Not much recollection of anything really. The voices were screaming. People kept walking in and out of the room, talking at her. She didn't talk back, didn't know who was real and who wasn't. Needles in her arm—it was poison. Lead, she'd thought. Arsenic. They were killing her. She didn't want to die. She was just a _kid_ , and terrified of what might happen. They kept her in the restraints for _hours_ , unattended, until her muscles ached from staying in the same position for so long. She hadn't even been fighting, or thrashing, was mostly just crying her eyes out and asking what they were doing to her. (She knew now how fucked up that was, how that shouldn't have happened to her, how she probably had a case for malpractice, but she'd decided a long time ago that it would take too much time and effort that she didn't have to pursue a lawsuit.) Her mom came in to see her, sobbing. Her dad came in, too, told her, not in so many words, to pull herself together. Her sister Melissa came in and didn't say much at all, just awkwardly held her hand, which Spencer had found oddly soothing.

They finally transferred her to another facility when a bed opened up. And there they didn't restrain her, there they treated her like a human being. It was better, had more funding and specifically trained staff. She'd stayed until the noise in her brain diminished. She'd stayed until she voluntarily took the pills they gave her. She'd stayed until therapy started to take. She'd stayed until she, slowly, emerged out of what turned out to be her first psychotic break.

She'd gone back to school to rumors and whispers and people that had already decided she was crazy. They didn't even give her a chance to defend herself, just assumed that she was the closest thing to a serial killer that they'd ever seen because that's all they knew about "schizos", who were portrayed as blood-soaked maniacs in the media. Not people. Just monsters. And Spencer had been all but chased out of school with torches and pitchforks.

It didn't matter, anyway. (It did, but she hadn't been in a place to process it at the time.) She got her G.E.D. and went straight to college. Which took a while, admittedly, since she had a couple more episodes before her doctor finally found a good cocktail of drugs that stabilized her, but she did it. Her school was surprisingly accommodating through the process, and she learned to tell when she was getting bad because the negative symptoms, the symptoms that took something away from her, would start to kick in—she'd lie in bed all day, apathetic, scrolling through her phone, and forget to eat, and bathe, and sleep. She knew she was about to have an episode when she started having full-bodied visual hallucinations instead of just auditory ones, so she would call her therapist for advice, or go to the hospital if it was bad.

It wasn't all downhill cruising from there, though. There'd been a grieving period after her second episode of psychosis. She'd thought, with quite a heavy heart, that her life wasn't going to be at all what she wanted it to be. She'd thought that she was going to fail at everything, considering that she could barely concentrate enough to get through one chapter of a novel in an hour whereas before she'd been able to read a three-hundred page book in a day. Her cognitive prowess just wasn't the same, and she still struggled with her sense of self-worth to this day.

That's where Aria came in. Her girlfriend was the strongest force of positivity in her life, and reminded her often that it was okay to feel like absolute shit. Aria didn't care if she was perfect. In fact, Aria quite liked the imperfect, the flawed, the quirky. She dressed in animal print and leather and wore forks for earrings. She held conversations with the voices in her head, talked back at the nastier ones. She _embraced_ the weird, and that's how she survived the worst of it.

Aria had wandered around DC for four days before her roommate finally reported her missing. They found her sleeping on the sidewalk outside the American History Museum, and she'd been hospitalized after running away from the police and paramedics, who had been faster than her and caught up easily. Aria found it in herself to laugh about the absurdity of it now, but she'd been fully convinced they were trying to hurt her, and she'd been impossibly scared at the time. She hadn't gone without a fight, but she'd sought out the members of the team that'd brought her in once she'd recovered and personally apologized for getting aggressive. Which, Spencer pointed out upon hearing the story, maybe shouldn't have been necessary since it wasn't exactly her fault, but it was appreciated anyway. They'd treated her well, Aria had said, and Spencer was extremely glad for it, especially considering her own bad experiences with emergency psychiatric treatment.

Spencer did still have the occasional nightmare about being put in four-point restraints. She would wake up in a cold sweat, and it would take Aria ages to calm her down. She'd brought it up with her therapist, eventually, and she'd been helping her process that trauma. Apparently, she had quite a bit of it, which… _joy_. The nightmares were slowly beginning to ebb, though, so that was good. It was progress.

Other than that, they were doing well. Aria still scrambled her sentences sometimes, jumping from point A to point Z to point C until Spencer couldn't understand a bit of what she was talking about, and she'd gained some weight from her meds, which she'd tolerated so far. Spencer did the same word-salad thing, but her main issue was that her body would twitch randomly, and she had trouble properly emoting at work. Which didn't do much in the way of effecting her job performance. She was still a workaholic (old habits), so her boss always gave her positive feedback. But it made her feel rather awful, subhuman even, when she'd try to interact with her colleagues, and sometimes they'd just stare blankly at her. Same with her clients, but they saw what she could do and accepted her oddities.

Aria managed an art blog in her spare time, and Spencer loved seeing all the things she'd post. She would bring her hallucinations to life, paint them for the sake of wrenching back some control away from them. She had power over them with her paintbrush, and Spencer admired her for it. The noise in Spencer's own head was difficult to explain, and it jumbled her thoughts until she almost cried out of pure frustration. That was why she kept their house so organized. It was her own form of expression—making sure everything was in its place was her way of claiming control, especially when it felt like her brain just wouldn't straighten out.

On bad days, when the noise was just a little bit _too_ loud and Spencer just couldn't ignore it, struggled to get out of bed, she had Aria there to hold her through it. And Spencer tried her best to pick Aria up when she was down. They cared deeply for each other and they managed that way. They listened to each other, and Spencer had never been as good at communication as she was right now. Aria was teaching her. They were learning together, taking baby steps. Making _progress_. One day at a time.

On good days—and good days were the best—they were happy, they could joke around, and Spencer felt human. Aria would hand her a paintbrush and drag her over to the canvas, and they'd paint. Explosions of color, caricatures of the people in their heads, the worst of the visuals that they'd ever seen. It all seeped out in acrylic form, and it wasn't so scary that way, Spencer thought. It was contained, and they'd be laughing at the mistakes, enjoying themselves, and, really, that's all that mattered.

Especially if their lives were straight out of a bad comedy skit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was very tricky to figure out the angle I wanted to take with this one, but eventually I landed on this format. It's just kinda train of thought, talking about how they manage together and what they've gone through. Hopefully I did this illness justice, and made somebody somewhere newly aware of the symptoms and struggles that schizophrenic people deal with. It's kind of lighthearted in some places because I really don't want this series to be all doom and gloom, and people with mental illness don't have lives that are all bad all the time. They're just people, there's ups and there's downs, and I hope that was how it came across.
> 
> Also, it's a sad reality that emergency mental health care in the US isn't the greatest. People are regularly subjected to mistreatment and aggressive handling because police and ER staff aren't trained on how to properly handle someone in the midst of psychosis. Some are, of course, and some hospitals and police departments have wonderful, caring staff and helpful procedures, but there's still a lack of quality care in many places. People are often left to wait until beds open up, and by then they're past the critical moments of crisis where they need the most support. I just wanted to bring your attention to this issue, and I hope you can do your own research into the topic if you feel so inclined.
> 
> Please forgive me, also, as I'm not entirely sure of the best way to help the situation or I would recommend things and point you in a direction that could help. I couldn't find many resources, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there. Maybe just start with reaching out to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) if you're in the US. Or reach out to your local police department if you're able and ask about how they're trained to deal with a mental health crisis. Start a conversation if you can. Educate yourself with videos and articles. Of course, don't feel pressured to be a rock star advocate, especially with all that's going on lately. After all, you need to take care of your own mental health before you can take care of others! (Which, I should probably take my own advice ahah…)
> 
> Anyway, I hope you're all doing well! Stay safe out there :D


End file.
